Predicting acoustic response of a microbubble population for contrast imaging

Although the behaviour of a bubble in an acoustic field has been studied extensively, very few theoretical studies to date have been applied to simulate realistically the acoustic response of a population of variably sized microbubbles in a finite width sound beam. In this paper, the authors present a Trilling-type equation for single bubble dynamics which has been numerically solved for different conditions. Radiated waveforms from a number of these bubbles were combined in a way that reflects the size distribution and beam shape of real acoustic measurements. The results were time-domain pressure waveforms that can be compared to experiments. The dependence of second harmonic radiations on incident focal amplitude at different frequencies is presented. This model is particularly suited to the study of interaction between beam shape and bubble nonlinearity